If a hurricane near New Orleans is accompanied by lots of rain these things are known to happen, the city's own, quite famous, pumps will move the rainwater to three "outfall" canals built for that purpose.

Their configuration altered as she walked on, and other features disclosed themselves in the moving landscape: a church tower and a silage tower in the distance, a yellow combine harvester far off at a field's edge, a shed, a sewage outfall.

There were years when some irrigators couldn't draw water from the system because it wasn't available, and the basin's main waterway—the Murray River—dried up before reaching its outfall in the Southern Ocean, east of Adelaide city.

At other times, as when the Corps opposes the local community's preference for the so-called Option 2 plan for permanent improvements on the outfall canals whose walls failed catastrophically in 2005, the Corps is believed to exaggerate the costs of a project it doesn't want to build.